The following is a
letter that Richard Dawkins wrote to his daughter when she turned 10. Richard
is one of the world's most renowned scientists who is known for speaking out
against the dangers of religion.

To my dearest
daughter,

Now that you are
ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you
ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for
instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really
huge balls of fire like the Sun and very far away? And how do we know that the
Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the Sun?

The answer to these
questions is ‘evidence.’

Sometimes evidence
means actually seeing (or hearing, feeling, smelling….) that something is true.
Astronauts have traveled far enough from the Earth to see with their own eyes
that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The ‘evening star’ looks like a
bright twinkle in the sky but with a telescope you can see that it is a beautiful
ball – the planet we call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing (or
hearing or feeling…) is called an observation.

Often evidence
isn’t just observation on its own, but observation always lies at the back of
it. If there’s been a murder, often nobody (except the murderer and the dead
person!) actually observed it. But detectives can gather together lots of other
observations which may all point towards a particular suspect. If a person’s
fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is evidence that he touched
it. It doesn’t prove that he did the murder, but it can help when it’s joined
up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can think about a whole
lot of observations and suddenly realize that they all fall into place and make
sense if so-and-so did the murder.

Scientists – the
specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the universe –
often work like detectives. They make a guess (called a hypothesis) about what
might be true. They then say to themselves: if that were really true, we ought
to see so-and-so. This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is
really round, we can predict that a traveler, going on and on in the same
direction, should eventually find himself back where he started. When a doctor
says that you have measles he doesn’t take one look at you and see measles. His
first look gives him a hypothesis that you may have measles. Then he says to
himself: if she really has measles, I ought to see… Then he runs through his
list of predictions and tests them with his eyes (have you got spots?), his
hands (is your forehead hot?), and his ears (does your chest wheeze in a measly
way?). Only then does he make his decision and say, ‘I diagnose that the child
has measles.’ Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood tests or
X-rays, which help their eyes, hands and ears to make observations.

The way scientists
use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated
than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on from evidence,
which is a good reason for believing something, and warn you against three bad
reasons for believing anything. They are called ‘tradition,'‘authority,'and
‘revelation.'

First, tradition. A
few months ago, I went on television to have a discussion with about 50
children. These children were invited because they’d been brought up in lots of
different religions. Some had been brought up as Christians, others as Jews,
Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs. The man with the microphone went from child to child,
asking them what they believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by
‘tradition.' Their beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They
just trotted out the beliefs of their parents and grandparents, which, in turn,
were not based upon evidence either. They said things like, ‘We Hindus believe
so and so.’ ‘We Muslims believe such and such.’ ‘We Christians believe
something else.’ Of course, since they all believed different things, they
couldn’t all be right. The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite
proper, and he didn’t even try to get them to argue out their differences with
each other. But that isn’t the point I want to make. I simply want to ask where
their beliefs came from. They came from tradition. Tradition means beliefs
handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books
handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from almost
nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about
Thor and Zeus. But after they’ve been handed down over some centuries, the mere
fact that they are so old makes them seem special. People believe things simply
because people have believed the same thing over centuries. That’s tradition.

The trouble with tradition
is that, no matter how long ago a story was made up, it is still exactly as
true or untrue as the original story was. If you make up a story that isn’t
true, handing it down over any number of centuries doesn’t make it any truer!

Most people in England
have been baptized into the Church of England, but this is only one of many
branches of the Christian religion. There are other branches such as the
Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic and the Methodist churches. They all
believe different things. The Jewish religion and the Muslim religion are a bit
more different still; and there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims.
People who believe even slightly different things from each other often go to
war over their disagreements. So you might think that they must have some
pretty good reasons – evidence – for believing what they believe. But actually
their different beliefs are entirely due to different traditions.

Let’s talk about
one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe that Mary, the mother of
Jesus, was so special that she didn’t die but was lifted bodily into Heaven.
Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary did die like anybody
else. These other religions don’t talk about her much and, unlike Roman
Catholics, they don’t call her the ‘Queen of Heaven.' The tradition that Mary’s
body was lifted into Heaven is not a very old one. The Bible says nothing about
how or when she died; in fact the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the Bible
at all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn’t invented until
about six centuries after Jesus’s time. At first it was just made up, in the
same way as any story like Snow White was made up. But, over the centuries, it
grew into a tradition and people started to take it seriously simply because
the story had been handed down over so many generations. The older the
tradition became, the more people took it seriously. It finally was written
down as an official Roman Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950. But the
story was no more true in 1950 than it was when it was first invented 600 years
after Mary’s death.

I’ll come back to
tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it in another way. But first I
must deal with the two other bad reasons for believing in anything: authority
and revelation.

Authority, as a
reason for believing something, means believing it because you are told to
believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope is the
most important person, and people believe he must be right just because he is
the Pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are old
men with beards called Ayatollahs. Lots of young Muslims are prepared to commit
murder, purely because the Ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.

When I say that it
was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally told that they had to
believe that Mary’s body shot off to Heaven, what I mean is that in 1950 the
Pope told people that they had to believe it. That was it. The Pope said it was
true, so it had to be true! Now, probably some of the things that Pope said in
his life were true and some were not true. There is no good reason why, just
because he was the Pope, you should believe everything he said, any more than
you believe everything that lots of other people say. The present Pope has
ordered his followers not to limit the number of babies they have. If people
follow his authority as slavishly as he would wish, the results could be
terrible famines, diseases and wars, caused by overcrowding.

Of course, even in
science, sometimes we haven’t seen the evidence ourselves and we have to take
somebody else’s word for it. I haven’t with my own eyes, seen the evidence that
light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Instead, I believe books
that tell me the speed of light. This looks like ‘authority.' But actually it
is much better than authority because the people who wrote the books have seen
the evidence and anyone is free to look carefully at the evidence whenever they
want. That is very comforting. But not even the priests claim that there is any
evidence for their story about Mary’s body zooming off to Heaven.

The third kind of
bad reason for believing anything is called ‘revelation.' If you had asked the
Pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary’s body disappeared into Heaven, he would
probably have said that it had been ‘revealed’ to him. He shut himself in his
room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he
became more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a
feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no
evidence that it is true, they call their feeling ‘revelation.' It isn’t only
popes who claim to have revelations. Lots of religious people do. It is one of
their main reasons for believing the things that they do believe. But is it a
good reason?

Suppose I told you
that your dog was dead. You’d be very upset, and you’d probably say, ‘Are you
sure? How do you know? How did it happen?’ Now suppose I answered: ‘I don’t
actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence. I just have this funny
feeling deep inside me that he is dead.’ You’d be pretty cross with me for
scaring you, because you’d know that an inside ‘feeling’ on its own is not a
good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We all
have inside feelings from time to time, and sometimes they turn out to be right
and sometimes they don’t. Anyway, different people have opposite feelings, so
how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only way to be sure that a dog
is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by
somebody who has seen or heard some real evidence that he is dead.

People sometimes
say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be
confident of things like ‘My wife loves me.'

But this is a bad
argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through
the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of
little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside
feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside
things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the
voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.

Sometimes people
have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it is not based upon
any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely wrong. There are people
with a strong inside feeling that a famous film star loves them, when really
the film star hasn’t even met them. People like that are ill in their minds. Inside
feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you just can’t trust them.

Inside feelings are
valuable in science too, but only for giving you ideas that you later test by
looking for evidence. A scientist can have a ‘hunch’ about an idea that just
‘feels’ right. In itself, this is not a good reason for believing something.
But it can be a good reason for spending some time doing a particular
experiment, or looking in a particular way for evidence. Scientists use inside
feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not worth anything until they
are supported by evidence.

I promised that I’d
come back to tradition, and look at it in another way. I want to try to explain
why tradition is so important to us. All animals are built (by the process called
evolution) to survive in the normal place in which their kind live. Lions are
built to be good at surviving on the plains of Africa. Crayfish are built to be
good at surviving in fresh water, while lobsters are built to be good at
surviving in the salt sea. People are animals too, and we are built to be good
at surviving in a world full of … other people. Most of us don’t hunt for our
own food like lions or lobsters, we buy it from other people who have bought it
from yet other people. We ‘swim’ through a ‘sea of people.' Just as a fish
needs gills to survive in water, people need brains that make them able to deal
with other people. Just as the sea is full of salt water, the sea of people is
full of difficult things to learn. Like language.

You speak English
but your friend speaks German. You each speak the language that fits you to
‘swim about’ in your own separate ‘people sea.' Language is passed down by
tradition. There is no other way. In England, Pepe is a dog. In Germany he is
ein Hund. Neither of these words is more correct, or more truer than the other.
Both are simply handed down. In order to be good at ‘swimming about in their
people sea,'children have to learn the language of their own country, and lots
of other things about their own people; and this means that they have to
absorb, like blotting paper, an enormous amount of traditional information.
(Remember that traditional information just means things that are handed down
from grandparents to parents to children.) The child’s brain has to be a sucker
for traditional information. And the child can’t be expected to sort out good
and useful traditional information, like the words of a language, from bad or
silly traditional information, like believing in witches and devils and
ever-living virgins.

It’s a pity, but it
can’t help being the case, that because children have to be suckers for
traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell
them, whether true or false, right or wrong. Lots of what grown-ups tell them is
true and based on evidence or at least sensible. But if some of it is false,
silly or even wicked, there is nothing to stop the children believing that too.
Now, when the children grow up, what do they do? Well, of course, they tell it
to the next generation of children. So, once something gets itself strongly
believed – even if it's completely untrue and there never was any reason to
believe it in the first place — it can go on forever.

Could this be what
happened with religions? Belief that there is a god or gods, belief in Heaven,
belief that Mary never died, belief that Jesus never had a human father, belief
that prayers are answered, belief that wine turns into blood – not one of these
beliefs is backed up by any good evidence. Yet millions of people believe them.
Perhaps this is because they were told to believe them when they were young
enough to believe anything.

Millions of other
people believe quite different things, because they were told different things
when they were children. Muslim children are told different things from
Christian children, and both grow up utterly convinced that they are right and
the others are wrong. Even within Christians, Roman Catholics believe different
things from Church of England people or Episcopalians, Shakers or Quakers,
Mormons or Holy Rollers, and all are utterly convinced that they are right and
the others are wrong. They believe different things for exactly the same kind
of reason as you speak English and someone speaks German.

Both languages are,
in their own country, the right language to speak. But it can’t be true that
different religions are right in their own countries, because different
religions claim that opposite things are true. Mary can’t be alive in the
Catholic Republic but dead in Protestant Northern Ireland.

What can we do
about all this? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only
ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds
important, think to yourself: ‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably
know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe
because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And, next time somebody tells
you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is
there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think
very carefully before you believe a word they say.

Your loving,

Daddy

"Faith
is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate
evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of
evidence."
—Richard Dawkins

*Dr RICHARD DAWKINS,
FRS, FRSL is an evolutionary biologist; reader in the
Department of Zoology at Oxford University; fellow of New College. He began his
research career in the 1960s as a research student with Nobel Prize-winning
ethologist Nico Tinbergen, and ever since then, his work has largely been
concerned with the evolution of behavior.

Since
1976, when his first book, The Selfish Gene, encapsulated both the
substance and the spirit of what is now called the socio-biological revolution,
he has become widely known, both for the originality of his ideas and for the
clarity and elegance with which he expounds them. A subsequent book, The
Extended Phenotype, and a number of television programs, have extended the
notion of the gene as the unit of selection, and have applied it to biological
examples as various as the relationship between hosts and parasites and the
evolution of cooperation. His following book, The Blind Watchmaker, is
widely read, widely quoted, and one of the truly influential intellectual works
of our time. He is also author of the 2006 book, The God Delusion, which
has been translated into 32 languages.